Critical Essay by Desmond Pacey

SOURCE: “Bliss Carman,” in Ten Canadian Poets: A Group of Biographical and Critical Essays, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958, pp. 85-113.

In the following excerpt, Pacey provides an overview of Carman's major volumes of poetry, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. He concludes that, while Carman's body of work is mostly flawed and unremarkable, some of his poetry demonstrates a mastery of mood and atmosphere, and is notable for its celebration of the Canadian Maritime region.

The poetry of Bliss Carman offers some unusual difficulties to the critic. Its mere volume is one difficulty: a detailed poem-by-poem analysis would take an enormous amount of space. As I have said elsewhere, the first task of a critic of Carman is to perform a surgical operation, to cut away the mass of inferior work. But this operation is a far from...